The Yield

by Tara June Winch

  ‘Maybe,’ August said. ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘Keep the tray,’ Alena said, and kissed her on the cheek and walked to the passenger-side door.

  James looked at August with an easy contempt. ‘I’d go with the later one. You’re a blow-in in this town anyway, so don’t stick your nose in shit where it don’t belong.’

  August saw Alena jump in the car and slap James across the arm. ‘Yessir,’ August said, and mock-saluted him. He started the car and she gave him the finger as they drove off.

  She looked up at Kengal. She couldn’t see anybody, but it appeared as if there were more tents up there: little angled tops, stegosaurus bones. She took the lamingtons inside.

  ‘I got dessert!’ August yelled to her nana and Aunt Missy washing dishes at the sink.

  She ripped the foil off the wonky lamingtons crammed over the cling-wrapped tray. Chocolate sauce and coconut were smeared everywhere.

  ‘Still edible,’ she said, and took a lamington and placed the rest on the kitchen bench. In the space left from where she’d taken the lamington she saw the word Pack in purple. ‘Covert Alena!’ August hooted, and slopped the entire tray of lamingtons onto the foil covering, then removed the cellophane.

  ‘Rinepalm Mining Activity Pack,’ she read, and pulled it from the cellophane, waving it.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Aunt Missy screwed her face up.

  August looked at it. Realised it wasn’t especially informative. ‘Alena wanted to be a smuggler for a day, I guess.’ She held it limply beside her and offered to dry the dishes.

  ‘August, if you want to do your investigating then go into the bedroom and look through all the mining papers I’ve got in the dresser. You can have a read on the bed.’ Elsie winked at August. ‘You’re a smart cookie. You always were, Augie.’

  Missy looked at her mum, ‘What about me, Mum?’

  ‘You’re the light relief, Missy,’ Elsie chuckled, as she stacked clean plates into the packing box.

  August kicked her shoes off to go to her nana’s room.

  ‘No, Aug, read it in the car tomorrow. Stay, we’ve got to help pack and clean.’

  Aunt Missy and August worked in a frenzy, filling and taping boxes and scrawling the contents along the sides and top of the cardboard. Elsie was impressed. She handed August the mining portfolio, as if it were pocket money.

  ‘Did you read it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Lies in there, coming straight from the horse’s arse.’

  Later, in the attic room, August read through it. The portfolio explained Rinepalm plans, its pages had plenty of stock photos of employed people in identical shirts. There were old letters collected within the portfolio that her nana and poppy had received about the mine proposal. There was lots of talk and promise in the words but not much depth, August felt. She sat in the single bed and took a closer look at the activity pack.

  It was weird. It was stranger than the mining portfolio for adults, but she couldn’t put her finger on how. The graphics were as chaotic as a Happy Meal box. Crosswords featured words like emerald, diamond, ruby, iron, ore, silver, opal. A mole in a hard hat was the mascot. He wore a tiny orange waistcoat. There were drawings of industrial drills burrowing down into the layers of the earth, a cross-section view. In one of the layers the designers had drawn a skeleton of a stegosaurus. She counted on her fingers the other dinosaur names she could remember: brontosaurus, pterodactyl, triceratops, tyrannosaurus rex. That was all. She thought she should probably go back to school.

  Inside the plastic sleeve there were glossy cardboard pieces perforated into sheets. She took the sheets aside and popped out each of the numbered pieces. She followed the instructions and made herself a little drilling rig. She placed it on the bedside table. Alena was right, it was pure propaganda – bite-size, child-size, colourful, cheery brainwashing.

  She looked out through the missing shard of the Lutheran rose towards Southerly. It was dark there. Eddie had loaned Jedda and her one of his walkie-talkies when they were kids. They’d take it in turns to tell kid jokes: August remembered one of Eddie’s, a kangaroo and a rabbit are doing a poo in the bush, the kangaroo asks the rabbit if he has problems with poo sticking to his fur. The rabbit says no, so the kangaroo wipes his bum with the rabbit. August smiled at the memory resurfacing as a shore exposed at low tide, she heard Jedda’s laughter squeal in her mind. Over and out he’d say. Over and out they’d say.

  After Elsie had gone to bed Missy came up to the room with the shoebox from Southerly. They went through a few of the pieces sleepily.

  ‘We could claim Native Title,’ Missy said, her face revisiting the idea.

  ‘You reckon? Joey said – no it was Aunt Nicki, or both of them – that it’d be impossible.’

  ‘This is the missing piece, August, these are artefacts; we’re not extinct with this. I reckon it’d stop the mine at least. Let me read the submissions to you.’

  August crossed her legs on the bed and leant back into the wall.

  Missy read the detailed descriptions of the artefacts aloud slowly, her voice rose a little at the end of each sentence like she was steadying, bracing against a tear. While her Aunt Missy read August tucked her legs under the covers and lay her head on the pillow. She looked up at her aunt. It was just like getting a bedtime story. She felt so happy to have her sit so close and read to her.

  Missy noticed August slipping into sleep and got up and tucked the blankets in, popped the lid on the shoebox. She said she’d lock the house up and for August to pick her up in the morning from her place in the Valley. She’d bring sleeping bags and stuff. August asked dreamily for a hug and Missy held her tight and then kissed August on the forehead.

  When her aunt closed the bedroom door August rolled onto her side away from the wall. She thought about the words Eddie had said: slave yard. It couldn’t be true. The cardboard purple, green and orange drilling rig cast a small shadow beside the bedside lamp. August reached out and switched off the light.

  Open road, going somewhere, elsewhere – she loved that feeling. She knew that about herself. She knew she loved leaving more than a drink, more than sex, more than hunger, the books. The road didn’t have a caved-in feeling or a hangover, it could have any wonder in the whole world. But she felt different then, without wanderlust. She felt the pull like magnets to Prosperous, and the road, even with her Aunt Missy, felt ominous, strange – she wanted to be home almost as soon as they’d left.

  She had ached for that thing, that feeling to want something. To feel like she had a purpose. That she was part of something. While living in England, she took trips alone some summers. She spent her spare time looking for cheap train tickets, forums where people couldn’t follow through on their plans. She’d gone to the harbour of Portsmouth, stood ahead the ache of its blue mouth, where the fleets had departed and caused it all. She wandered the streets of Bath and Oxford and London. Every place was interesting enough for a girl from Massacre Plains. Though she really saw little, the footpaths mostly, the churches, the supermarket aisles, the bakeries, the bookstores, the bars.

  One place stuck. She’d planned to hitchhike to Edinburgh but only made it north of Middlesbrough. She spent a few days in the plains beyond, where she discovered Hadrian’s Wall. The wall had been built by the Romans when they were brutal conquerors or bringers of civilisation. She didn’t know. Along the wall that crossed three rivers she found a small museum at Chesters Roman Fort, and with no other visitors that day, the curator had given her a tour. She’d shown August a Vindolanda writing tablet, one of a thousand. It was two miniature slices of wood pressed together by time and discovered in a dig only decades before. When the archaeologists had opened them they found hieroglyphics inside, yet just as soon as the tablets were opened, the writing disappeared in the elements. Finally after experimenting, the inscriptions were able to be photographed under special lighting. They were cursive Latin, and the curator had told her they were still being deciphered – almost two thousa
nd years later. And then the curator picked up a piece of ceramic that had inscriptions scraped into the clay, made before it was set as stone. She’d translated it for August, that sad-looking young woman alone in the museum at wall’s end. ‘Read, and good luck to you’. ‘Who wrote it to who?’ August asked, and the woman explained that at the time the pen was as important as the sword, that words were paramount, and that the message was made when the tile was still soft, and that it must have been a gesture from one stone worker teaching another stone worker to read. August had smiled, though she didn’t take a photo. She’d never taken photos. Looking back, she didn’t know why; it was as if everyone around her were taking the photos on her behalf in a way. She was just an observer on their vacations; she’d write a poem instead. Besides, she never did like her photo being taken.

  The stone, like the North African redware, the bronze saucepan from Italy, the ivory from India, the pottery water containers, the glass bottle in the shape of a West African head, made in Germany, the curator said, or Egypt – it was all a picture, a sculpture – an incidental passage of time, there upon a shelf on the wall. A line of stones that over time had no sure beginning or end to its construction. It was evidence of the other, that it had once been a bustling sort of city in the middle of nowhere, where different cultures came together. There were Syrians, North Africans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, French, Spanish, German, all ‘serving’ the Empire, a gaggle of languages.

  She had walked to a higher point overlooking the rolling green hills, where ordered rows of fencing had twisted loose. She had thought about how everywhere in that place Romans had written the local people out of their history. She was trying to figure out how people valued a thing, what made something revered while other things were overlooked. Who decided what was out with the old, what had to have a replacement? What traditions stayed and what tools, household items, art, things, evidence of someone, languages, fell away. But when she tried to draw a vague line to the artefacts of Prosperous she was stumped – why the artefacts of Middlesbrough were important and not those from home.

  August didn’t tell Aunt Missy about the wall she’d seen when they stopped at the petrol station to pour the thermos coffee. August slugged the last of the water and dropped the plastic bottle into the bin.

  She wandered idly back from the recycling station to her aunt, who was tapping her foot at the opened passenger door. ‘Quit ya dawdling – we haven’t got much time to stop the mine!’

  ‘Is that what we’re doing?’ August asked, jumping into the driver’s seat and pulling at the seatbelt.

  ‘I reckon we are.’

  They passed roadkill, but no wildlife bounced into the path of the rental. August asked about what Poppy was like at the end, about where he thought he was going.

  ‘He worked in the garden right up until the end; he used to think retirement was for suckers. He always used to say, You’ve got to keep busy.’

  ‘I mean the afterlife?’

  ‘He said he wasn’t going to be a star so don’t bother craning your neck.’

  ‘Did he?’

  Missy laughed. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘He said religion is being afraid of death, that it was made to calm the philosophers down, or something. Ah! He did say something that I liked. He said none of us should be scared to go to sleep.’ Missy was silent for a bit and then said, ‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yep.’ August said. ‘What do you believe in?’

  ‘Same as Dad. We go back to the earth and become other things in nature.’

  ‘Did he say anything about what happens next, at the end?’

  Missy took a big breath, tried to erase the lifeless image from her mind.

  ‘Those final stages went on for a couple of days. The soul and the mind are there, but the body can’t do anything else to be with the mind – it’s like he became split. The natural split. At that moment I didn’t want it to end, I just wanted another day, then you want another hour, another minute. It’s all precious in the end! It’s like there are never enough details left. I wanted everything back. Fingerprints, photos, every story, nights that were longer. A right time to die? To be separated? There isn’t, August. It hurts all the time, it hurts to lose someone, doesn’t it?’

  August was crying. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘In the hospital in the end the nurse said something nice to me, she said she was sending me white light.’

  ‘White light?’

  ‘Think about it, Aug, it’s beautiful – it’s like the light breaking through the gums, the day reflected off the top of choppy water, all the sun’s energy in that moment. That nurse, she wanted to send me electricity, you know?’

  ‘Divine light,’ August said.

  ‘Yeah, holy light from nature, that’s beautiful.’

  ‘You think you’ll go to heaven, Aunty?’

  ‘Nah! I’ll be back as a tree or something that doesn’t move. I just want to chill out and not have to go hunting for food, you know?’

  Later August stopped for Missy to take over the driving for the last three hundred kilometres. August returned to reading the cards aloud. ‘Wooden shovel, used for digging earth mounds.’

  ‘Can you believe it?’ Missy said. ‘Our ancestors! Take my phone, check and see if there’s that thing from the library lady.’

  August opened up her email on Missy’s charged phone, there was an attachment from a council address. In the body of the email Julie had typed: I hope all is well. I had a look at it again, it’s Reverend Greenleaf ’s letter to the organisers of the World’s Fair in Chicago. If you need anything else, I’m more than happy to help.

  ‘You want me to read the letter aloud?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s old, Aunty, I’ll get the accent all wrong.’

  ‘I’ll bet fifty bucks you won’t.’

  When August reached the end of the letter, Missy had to pull over. She walked out on the rest area holding her stomach like she was going to vomit. She was breathing deep, walking in little circles. ‘Our people!’ she said, but in a different way. Hurled the words out of her body, like the backlash of an axe caught in the timber knot of their family tree.

  August imagined the Reverend out in their field, in their home. She couldn’t believe that he lived out there, that he made Prosperous. Imagined him trying to protect those ancestors at the same time as punishing them. August remembered reading John Milton in England, he wrote about justifying the ways of God to men. She couldn’t remember the whole idea, but it seemed in the car then, as if they had all been wronged by people justifying the ways of God and not themselves, and that the Reverend had been wrong too. Hadn’t they all been godless and free and moral once? She wondered.

  ‘And what do you reckon happened after? After the government ran the Mission?’

  ‘When it became a station?’

  ‘Yeah,’ August confirmed, fearful of the answer.

  Missy started the car. ‘Real bad stuff, worse stuff.’

  ‘He was kind, you think?’

  ‘No. He was bad in a long pattern of bad. I reckon he just thought he was doing right.’

  ‘He regretted it.’

  ‘Yeah but, only when it happened to him too, aye. But there’s stuff in that letter, evidence of us Gondiwindi you know? Native Title evidence.’

  August stared into the road ahead. ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  The rest of the drive August asked Aunt Missy more about what Poppy had been like as a dad, what Jolene had been like as a sister, what Nana was like as a mum. She told August little snippets and they tried to laugh, as much as they could after reading the letter. They talked about stories of Elsie and the stories about August’s mum as a girl and they wept easily about the stories of Albert and tried not to talk about Jedda. They stopped at roadsides for candy bars and chewing gum. They listened to pop songs on the radio. The air kept coming in thick until they crossed the mountains and the temperature dropp
ed with the cool off the ocean.

  When Missy saw the water, her spirits lifted again, and she tapped the GPS screen. ‘Only a hundred kilometres left to go!’

  ‘We should’ve brought Joey along too,’ August said.

  ‘Should of, you’re right.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Tramp Jungle, I don’t know, nightclub opening in Broken. Tramp Jungle?’

  ‘Sounds … fun.’

  ‘My handbag, Aug,’ she motioned for August to open it. ‘Forgot I brought my own music!’

  They listened to Missy’s burnt CD of Tracy Chapman, and when ‘Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution’ came on she wound down the window and sang her lungs out. The rushing air caught in the window and hurt August’s ears. They listened to her Greatest Hits album on repeat until the words lost their meaning.

  Eight hours after they’d set out from Massacre Plains they parked at the city beach. Missy bought a lamb souvlaki wrapped in warm pita, August ordered the falafel, sour yoghurt dripped off both of their chins into the evening sand. The ocean was foreign to August, she’d wanted to know it, but not float like the bodies on the surface of the water, she imagined herself instead going deep down into the part of the ocean where no light gets in. Where the fish look like aliens, glow in the dark, sharp milk teeth.

  After they ate and the car park became deserted and dark, they brushed their teeth out the swung-open doors and spat onto the bitumen. They rolled back their seats and slid their legs into the hollows of sleeping bags and looked for stars that they couldn’t find.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Biyaami, spirit that ruled the Gondiwindi – Biyaami, Baiame When the world was young still, my ancestors told me, Biyaami came upon the earth and decided to make it a beautiful place to live, so he made the plateaus and the mountains, he made the deserts, and stretches of sand and seashores. He planted shrubs and flowers and trees and ferns in different places. Then he needed to make the waterways in order to feed the plants and trees he’d created. So he made the oceans, beaches, lakes and rivers too. He blew on his creation and had a lovely breeze sweep across the land. He loved what he’d made so much that he decided to stay up in a cave on Kengal Rock with Mother Earth. In the meantime, Marmoo the evil spirit had been watching all Biyaami had created and was jealous. He decided to destroy everything that Biyaami had made, so he went into his own cave and made some little strange creatures. The creatures flew sometimes, crawled sometimes, wriggled sometimes and had legs to get about, and of course wings too. Marmoo made millions and millions of the strange creatures and then released them into Biyaami’s creation. The creatures left Marmoo’s cave like a plague and ate and attacked all the beautiful plants. High on Kengal Rock Biyaami and Mother Nature saw the ugly brown patch that was growing larger and larger over the land. Biyaami started to fret while Mother Nature thought quick on her feet and ran into their cave to make a creature with long strong legs and a lean body and a sharp beak and white feathers. ‘What’s that?’ Biyaami asked. ‘It’s a bird,’ Mother Nature said. And she made many other ones, with different colours, and beaks, and shapes. ‘What does it do?’ Biyaami asked. ‘Look!’ Mother Nature said, and released the birds from the cave – there they soared down and ate all the insects. Before long the insects were under control and there was no more plague.